American Indians are supposed to have had the luxury of virgin land. Raised in the lap of a verdant nature, they had the luck to be able to live off her. We admire—or, more precisely, envy—this supposed good fortune. There is some truth to this legend. Because American mountain ranges run north to south—whereas those of Europe run east to west—it was easier for plant species to repopulate North America after the Ice Age than it was for them to come back into Europe. (The seed and pollen of European species had to go over the mountains, while the American mountains and the prevailing winds guided the trees north.) There are more than eight hundred species of native tree in eastern North America, and only around eighty in Europe. But the idea that the Indians lived passively in the lap of the land is both condescending and false. They shaped and maintained their land as thoroughly as did the Nordic peoples or the Basques. Only they responded to what they themselves had been given, a different gift.
Fruits and nuts in many parts of North America were readily available. Acorn was elegant. You just popped off the cup, broke the husk, and out popped the nutritious kernel. Chestnut was just as easy to eat, though a little starchy. Hickory nuts were not so easy to get at. In fact, they were something like a Chinese puzzle. You first had to extract the nut from its four-beaked covering, then open the tough husk and try to remove the seed, which was held to the husk by veining. If you have ever tried to open a hickory nut with a walnut opener, you know it is no easy proposition. The Indians who ate hickory nuts—mainly shagbark and mockernut—whacked the nut with a rock or a wooden mallet. Then they threw the broken mass into boiling water and let the heat and agitation sort out the meat from the skin. Or they picked out what shell they could and worked the remains into an oily ball called kanuchee. When they later soaked the ball to dissolve it, the shell bits floated to the surface, where they could be removed. Black walnut and butternut (or white walnut) both had a slimy, squishy outer husk that had to be removed before you got to the nut from which to extract the meat, but at least once that was done, the nut came out cleanly.
As comparatively laborious as they were to get at, however, hickory and walnuts were much easier to eat than acorn. Acorns had to be leached to remove the astringent tannins. The hickories and walnuts could be popped in the mouth. Furthermore, they were oily. If you put a butternut in your mouth, for instance, you learned why it was so named. An explosion of oil filled your mouth, and for a moment you were not sure if it was delicious or disgusting. All of them, unlike acorn, could be boiled to extract an oil for use in cooking and in medicine.
From around 8000 years ago until about 200—in other words, for almost eight millennia—these principal nut trees, along with about two dozen other trees and shrubs, formed the staple diet of the Indians of the eastern woodlands. The Indians did not climb the trees but waited for the nuts to fall. Throughout the river-bottom villages of the forestlands, the chief archaeological finds in middens and house sites were pieces of charred nut shells. Through the use of these plants, the Indians learned how to process and preserve vegetable foods to carry them more reliably through what could otherwise be the starving times of late winter. Even at the end of this period, during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the plant collector and writer William Bartram reported in his Travels a number of Creek and Cherokee villages that were surrounded by what he described as orchards of hickory and other nuts. He had not the least doubt that the Indians cultivated the trees. In one Creek household, he found stored away for winter about one hundred bushels of dried hickory nuts. At eight gallons to the bushel, that was about eight hundred gallons of nuts.
Without burning, however, these mast forests would not have lasted a century, never mind seven-plus millennia. All the nut species love sun. Without clearing, they are outcompeted by trees that tolerate shade: maples, hemlocks, beeches. (Thanks to Smokey the Bear and his fire suppression campaign, forests in some parts of the East, once dominated by oak and hickory, are now turning to red and sugar maple.) In most of the eastern woodland—except the far north and far south—the Indians burned parts of the woodland on a cycle of one to fifteen years. Studies of fire scars on ancient trees and studies of witness trees—those used to mark boundaries in deeds—show that the nut-bearing trees were very often close to Indian villages. The term Indian summer very likely referred to the red, hazy weather occasioned by regular autumn burning—not, as some have said, to Indian hunting season.
Burning the understory on a regular basis did not damage the large trees. At most, it may have caused them to release a few sprouts or suckers at the base. Dormant buds waited in broadleaf trees for a stimulus to release them. In the case of hickory, the appearance of basal sprouts was desirable, because the wood was in demand for bows and for tool handles of all kinds. (Hickory is still the preferred axe handle.) Burning removed diseased and infested nuts. It cleared away competitors and low ground covers that made gathering difficult. It brought more light to the understory. It killed the seedlings of the shade-tolerant trees that might otherwise have outcompeted the nut trees.
Clearing by fire also burned the tops, and sometimes the entire crowns, of the smaller plants that gave nuts and fruits to both animals and people. Redbud, serviceberry, hawthorn, Aronia, pawpaw, plum, hackberry, chokecherry, elberberry, sassafras, crab apple, black haw: all have edible fruit. The firing of the land acted as a kind of coppice, removing all or most of the plant to the base, from which it sprouted again. This brought low, straight, easily harvested stems for human users and readily available provender for deer and other animals upon which humans also fed.
The regular burning also gave rise to the first agriculture in eastern North America. The Indians of the eastern woodlands did not adopt corn agriculture until fourteen hundred years after the southwestern Indians. They had no need for it. The annual weeds along the flats by the river—marsh elder (a relative of ragweed), lamb’s-quarters, pumpkins and other squash, knotweed, little barley, and maygrass—all yielded large quantities of edible seed. Lamb’s-quarters gave back 50,000 seeds in exchange for 1, marsh elder 5,000 for 1.
What we call weeds, they called dinner. Opportunists that sprouted where the sun reached, these plants gave seeds to be ground for porridges and breads. In the fall, the women and children harvested the plants, saving seeds to plant again next spring. As they burned the nut-tree corners of the forest, they could plant the new crops in the sunny spaces. In this way, the Indians of the woodlands created a rich and enduring culture, driven not by scarcity and population pressure, but by orders-of-magnitude improvements in access to food.